SAfm, Wednesday morning

Ms. Pedro, good morning and welcome to the Daily Discourse. Why have you come up with this campaign at this juncture? Good morning and thank you for having me. We've come up with this campaign at this juncture because since 2007, electricity prices have gone up by 1,100%. That's six times the rate of gender inflation. So most households are struggling to keep their heads above water. In our country, 60% of people live in energy prices.

poverty, that means they don't have enough electricity to meet their basic needs without cutting into other essential needs like transport or food. And we went the climate justice organization and we went to different communities, community activists, trade unions, civil society organizations, and we tested and found out what is it that is the most important issue to you, what is most salient, what is it that you're willing to fight for. And electricity for all, universal access to feed, basic electricity.

Electricity was one of the most urgent and serious demands that communities and organizations put forward. And that's how we came up with the Electricity for All campaign and have been able to sustain it and build it this year. Yeah, that's the only ones why we've come about here. All right. So we know the government provides 50 kilowatt free hours a month to low-income and indigent households. You've said that's not enough. You're looking at 350 kilowatt hours. You've also said you're not sure every

Everyone who deserves free basic electricity is able to access it. On what do you base that? Well, it's common solved. National governments and the Department of Electricity have explained that only 2 million out of 10 million in 2025 people who were eligible, who would qualify as indigent in the municipalities, actually received the 50 kilowatt hour grant because the

administrative hurdles to be able to get onto the indigence register, to stay on the indigence register and access the 50 kilowatt hours is actually not fit for purpose. It's not fit to meet the needs of the number of families that could qualify as indigenous. So we see a lot of this money not getting to the people that it's been allocated for. But also what we see is that the distribution happens to municipalities and because I mean

Are so underfunded and dysfunctional in many cases and mismanaged, we see that the funding for indigenous, the funding for pre-basic allocation as part of the local government equitable share gets subsumed into other costs. So, what's happening really is that the poorest of the poor, people that should be accessing 50 kilowatt hours per month of electricity, are somehow subsidizing municipal dysfunction or

the underfining of municipalities for other services. And it can't be that the poorest of the poor are paying for, for example, production at Eskom, production in municipalities, or the dysfunction of our local government. So we're saying that we're calling for candidates, councillors, local governments to assure us that they're not going to allow these administrative exclusions and these bureaucratic barriers because hey, that shouldn't be the reason why people aren't getting their fee basic interests.